Tag Archives: conservative majority government

Seriously. If it were happening in any other named country in the world, we’d be staring, rolling our eyes, and wondering how the population managed to become so easily-led. But it’s not. It’s happening here. And there are swathes of people who care more about the irrational anger they fear when a foreign person can’t be deported than they do about the right to life being enshrined in law without parliamentary levers and pulleys attached to it.

Maybe it’s just that, somehow, they trust our government implicitly. It’s the same segment of the population, doubtless, that will be apologists for the Snooper’s Charter along the lines that nothing to hide means nothing to fear. Bizarrely, they’ll also say they have no faith in politics or politicians – but as soon as they’re elected, they trust death penalty advocate and education privatiser Michael Gove to protect their fundamental rights as citizens.

It’s hard to tell what’s more scary – the impending prospect of a British Bill of Rights which doesn’t apply to soldiers abroad and has a “seriousness threshold”, below which the rights won’t be actionable; or the fact that as a nation we’ve reached a stage where hatred of a handful of foreigners deemed to have played the system can, with the goading of the mainstream press and politicians alike, usurp the rights that were battled for through so much effort and blood. Richard Littlejohn’s hilarious insistence on calling them “Yuman Rights” has convinced his readers that our legally-enshrined freedom is a joke.

Indeed, there’s something perverse and nauseating about the hysterical reaction of the press to the defacing of a war memorial this week, as they celebrate the Conservatives’ plans to decimate the accountability and reliability of our Human Rights. It has to be seen to be believed.

The new Conservative government, with Michael Gove as Justice Secretary, plans to exclude British Armed Forces personal overseas from the reach of human rights cases, in order to stop such cases “undermin[ing] their ability to do their job and keep us safe”.

A document published in October 2014 by then-Justice Secretary Chris Grayling lays out the “case for change” and explains that the Conservative plan would also “limit the use of human rights laws to the most serious cases”.

Both of these worryingly-phrased objectives are buried in the final page of the document, and their ambiguity is huge cause for concern to those who fear that the notion of a “Bill of Rights” is a mechanism to dilute existing human rights legislation and make it easier for the state to infringe upon those rights where it wants to.